[Mark Bell]

We're working on an affordable housing project and it includes a small pool. No matter what settings we try the water looks cloudy. Does anyone know what the right settings need to be to make it look more like a swimming pool ? Screenshots and example below-


Pool photo as reference


Studio settings


WIP test render....with murky water

[choo-chee]

I usually use the "water" preset combined with a simple plane with simple bump map, that I downloaded from the MXM gallery like 10 or more years ago
I've noticed that if you want to have "cleaner" pools you must consider the surfaces below the water and not only the ones to be reflected on water's surface. usually I tend to use blue materials on those submerged surfaces (like blue or greenish mosaic), and make sure to have distinct material-id so it will be easy to edit in PS.

[choo-chee]

ps, trying to add blue shades to the water material itself usually doesn't help, only frustrates

[Mark Bell]

Hi Choo Chee.

Thanks for posting. I have used realistic finishes for the pool, in this case, it's more like a white Pebletex finish than tiled. We've got about 40 renders to produce for the project marketing whilst also documenting so I'll have a closer look at your ideas if there's time available.....the week's just seem to fly by these days~!
.

AMB_0772_CAM_COS_7D.jpg

[Forum Moderator]

Hello Mark,

In order to get a super clean and super fast-rendering water material, just create a normal transparent refractive material, assign it to the water plane object and then, select the object and, in its properties, hide it to GI (or global illumination). This way, you'll have a material that refracts the bottom of the pool, but doesn't cast shadows. However, with this trick, the water won't produce the under water caustics.
This problem happens with many ray-tracers like Maxwell. It's a probabilistic issue: it's very hard for a ray that comes from the camera to refract into the water, bounce on the bottom of the pool (once or several times), refract out of the water plane, and find a very small and very distance light, such as the sun. So, if you just use a refractive material (not hidden to GI) and the default sun radius, Maxwell may need rendering up to SL 32 to see clear caustics through the water. With the method described above, you can get a clean pool at SL 13-14, but without caustics. If you increase the sun radius to 10 (if I remember correctly), you may get a nice looking pool with caustics at SL24.
Using the "hide to GI" method, you can fake some caustics by duplicating the water plane. You'll have to move it a bit up so it is not perfectly coincident; then assing an AGS material to it and apply a mask texture that looks like a caustic pattern (such as this one, but inverted: https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/00/18/98/8 ... Y9RvZZ.jpg) to the material layer opacity, make the object visible to GI, but hidden to camera and reflections/refractions. This way, this duplicated object will generate some soft shadows where the the texture is white, and no shadow at all where the mask is black, creating a caustic-like pattern.

I know this is a bit convoluted, but it works nicely.

I hope this helps.
Best regards,
Fernando